The purpose of this essay is to explain why I believe Perl 6, the way it currently seems to progress, is the wrong thing at the wrong time, and why I predict (with all the expected caveats of predicting something) that it won't be successful. I will also suggest a better alternative for the future of Perl which makes more sense at this point.

I don't think so. One major reason why I orininally dumped python and went to ruby several years ago was because of the inconsistent API when dealing with simple types vs objects. I found python to be almost as annoying as perl because of the quirks.

The dichotomy between type and class in Python was a limitation of the implementation, not part of the language specification, and it is being (already?) fixed. Python also had other quirks like not being able to transparently convert between int and bigint, this is also an implementation issue and is already fixed.

I still hold that Python is more about simplicity than Ruby. You can expect someone to be sufficiently adept in Python in less time than in Ruby. In particular, Ruby's OO is more complex/advanced/has more options (though overall the model is still elegant). There's module nesting, aliases, hooks, ObjectSpace, object freezing, extending individual objects, protected/private/public as in C++ (Python doesn't have protected IIRC), etc.

Ruby isn't anywhere near perl, except that it borrowed the most useful text and file syntax from perl and still kept the language OO.

I'm not saying that Ruby is _most_ similar to Perl, just that it's much more similar to Perl than to Python. Syntaxes are part of the language too (Matz says "Syntax matters.").

Under the hood ruby and perl are vastly different languages. Ruby is closer to smalltalk than it is to perl.

Many people like to say this, but Matz himself says he copied the most from Lisp, not Smalltalk.